If you contribute work on Sugar, you are really contributing to
SugarLabs,
not OLPC. It is difficult to tell the difference, because many of
the people

working full-time on Sugar are OLPC employees or contractors, but
Sugar runs on laptops other than the OLPC XO.

Thus this question should probably be asked on the SugarLabs
mailing list.

(BTW, SugarLabs are also the people to ask "why not support MP3 ?")
For the record, OLPC has not "decided to throw away the majority of
that work out the window". This year we will ship Sugar on over
98.5% of laptops built. We continue to invest most of our resources
into development of Sugar. We will not ship laptops which are
not natively capable of booting Sugar, and have paid to have Open
Firmware extended to allow this (the only resource investment related
to supporting Windows.)
OLPC can't stop a deployment from installing Windows on our laptops.
And due to the fact that the "giant software stack" doesn't really
run "cleanly and quickly", some seem to be considering it.
In some countries, the ability to run Windows is written into the
tender for laptops -- even if the laptops will be delivered with Sugar
and likely will never run Sugar.

s/Sugar/Windows/ in that last line.

Do you only buy laptops/desktops for which the manufacturer has
refused to support Windows ?
wad
On Oct 7, 2008, at 10:12 AM, Bastiaan Jacques wrote:

I have to ask this question, although I should note that I'm an
outsider.

Why should we contribute to OLPC when OLPC has already agreed to
using
Microsoft's software and apparently has no (moral) objections to
using

Adobe's software?

To me (again, as an outsider) it seems to me that OLPC has
generated a
*huge* free software development momentum, and a massive amount of
work

was completed in order to let a giant software stack run cleanly and

quickly on the OLPC. Now OLPC has decided to throw the majority of
that

work out of the window (pun not intended) in favour of a proprietary
solution from a vendor that has apparently discovered a new part of
the world to enslave.
To me, it seems like whatever work might be done to get Gnash working
nicely on the OLPC is going to be thrown away almost as soon as it
might potentially be finished. So, I ask, why contribute?
Bastiaan
On Tue, 7 Oct 2008, Carlos Nazareno wrote: